Abbeville Institute

Donald Livingston is a former Professor of Philosophy at Emory University with an "expertise in the writings of David Hume." In 2003 he and Clyde Wilson founded the Abbeville Institute, which is devoted to the study of Southern culture and political ideas.

Livingston was raised in South Carolina. He received his doctorate at Washington University in 1965. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and has been on the editorial board of Hume Studies and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Livingston is a convert from Anglicanism to the Orthodox Church. His wife Marie also received her Ph.D. in philosophy and has studied under Edmund Gettier and Alasdair MacIntyre.

After teaching in several venues, Livingston became a professor of philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

He supports the compact theory of the United States, with its concomitant provisions for corporate resistance, nullification, and secession. Progressive columnist Chris Hedges has called him "one of the intellectual godfathers of the secessionist movement." The doctrine coincides with federalism, a robust account of states' rights, and the principle of subsidiarity. His political philosophy is informed by an Aristotelian conception of civilization and embodies the decentralizing themes echoed by European intellectuals such as Althusius, David Hume and Lord Acton; and Americans such as Thomas Jefferson, Spencer Roane, Abel Parker Upshur, Robert Hayne and John C. Calhoun. They hold the community and family as the elemental units of political society.